'Essentially we are Irish farmers milking oats'

Generations of Irish kids grew up on oats, but a Kilbeggan farmer is producing an entirely new type of oat product: oat milk.

Liam Lynam, who lives at Ballybroder, between Kilbeggan and Durrow, is the brains behind a range of new oatmilk drinks which are sold under the brand name ‘Oat in the City’ – a play on the word ‘authenticity’.

So impressed are Ireland’s supermarkets that already this new health product is set to appear on the shelves of Aldi, SuperValu and Centra.

The milk is offered as a choice for the growing numbers looking for an alternative to traditional milk products, and it is entering the market at a crucial time: there are already various popular alternatives such as soy milk and almond milk, but besides the nutritional benefits that oats offer, there is also the fact that they are grown here in Ireland.

“Essentially,” he explains, “we are Irish farmers milking oats and Oat In The City is a low-sugar drink using all of the oat, and containing therefore all the natural fibre and protein.”

After school, Liam moved to the UK to pursue a degree in agri-business and food marketing at Newcastle University, and then worked for Kepak, mainly in Italy and France.

When Liam and his Belgian doctor girlfriend Marie Christine de Tavenier decided to get married, they agreed that the place they wanted to settle and raise their family was Ireland.

There was no hesitation on the part of Marie-Christine, whose grandparents had been in farming.

“If anything she was more enthusiastic!” says Liam, and thus, around 12 years ago, the couple moved to Ballybroder, building a house on the land the Lynams have farmed for generations.

Since then, they have been joined by four children.

Liam and Marie-Christine had been considering ways of shifting from intensive commercial farming to low-input sustainable crops such as oats. As it happened, the lightbulb moment came when Marie Christine discovered she liked oat milk.

That piqued Liam’s interest, and when his research showed him that he could produce a healthier version of oat milk, without the added sugar but including more of the oat grain, he started investing more time in the product.

After what Liam summarises as “lots of research, trials and numerous errors” during the lockdown, their oat-based drink was born.

“We at Oat in the City use all of the oat and our oat drink range retains oats’ natural fibres, beta glucans and protein, has no added sugar and is low in natural sugars, while a while a lot of our global competitors’ drinks only contain sugar and the rest of the oat goes into food waste,” he explains.

“This is really important to us, because we are really interested in sustainability, and food waste is one of the leading causes of climate change.

“The process by which most commercial oat drinks are made results in the stripping away of the parts that have the fibre and the protein, so that you’re mostly getting oat sugar.”

Some oat milks available have a sugar content so high that it actually puts them on a par with fizzy drinks.

The initial name of the milk was Lynam’s ‘Authentic Oat Drink’.

That morphed into Authenticity and then Oatinthecity before the family settled on Oat In The City.